Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Run-DMSteve and Steven Bryan Bieler with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Don’t make me come out there.

New feature: Bands I saw 30 years apart!

The B-52s
Boston, Mass. 1979
Portland, Ore. 2007
In the summer of 1979, when The B-52s sang “Everybody had matching towels,” I was one of the people in that little club waving matching towels. Mine were white with a red checked pattern and I bought them that morning at Goodwill.

Of course none of us who had arrived at the club equipped with extracurricular textiles had considered what we were going to do with them after that line, since the rock lobster immediately appears and there’s no time for towels after that. They mostly ended up kicked into a corner. I’d like to think the club donated them all to Goodwill the next day.

I wish I knew the exact date of that show, and the time of the evening when they launched into “Rock Lobster,” because at that moment I was cooler than I’d ever been or ever would be again. (I saw The B-52s again in 1980 and 1981, by which time I was hauling a strobe light around with me.) Before the 2007 show I considered going back to Goodwill for more towels, but you can never recapture your old glory. Not even if you drove a Plymouth Satellite/faster than the speed of light.